Parenting and opinions go hand in hand.
There is always someone willing to share their perspective with you. There is always someone who thinks they are letting you know the real truth. There is always a parent telling you how to teach your child to behave as theirs takes a shit on a police dog.
We talk more than we know. It is habitual. I may be doing it right now.
This series of thoughts came about the other day as my wife entered the room and proclaimed aloud that she did something she shouldn’t have. Images of her buying the dog cigarettes or getting a compromising piercing jumped into my head until she stated that, “I read the comments.”
What she meant was, she read the comments on a recent spot I did for Global Television on being a stay-at-home dad (link below). The comment is as follows:
“Parental leave is either the mother or father receive it and they can split it. It makes sense for a mother to as she is breastfeeding perhaps and definitely needs to rest and heal. I call this anti mother propoganda.”
That is the actual text and I’m not going to name the woman, nor am I going to attack her for her opinion.
I will say this though: My wife is dedicated to our family. She puts up with my ridiculous malarky. She is the bread winner. There is no way in holy hell that I could keep this family afloat on a journalist’s salary.
She hugs the little hoser from when she gets home after work (sometimes a 12 hour day) to when she leaves the next morning. She is a dedicated mom who puts our health in front of her own. She breastfeeds, helps cook, helps clean and makes sure to take care of me. She is an excellent person and an excellent mother.
My point is that a certain group of people very rarely think before they speak. Examples of this are found all over the Internet and physical society. They use words that they don’t understand. They compromise facts. They rarely care for spelling.
Over compensation, specifically intellectual over compensation, is nothing new. But, with us all being interconnected through this social revolution, we can’t help but sometimes react to those people who think they know better about our kids, our politics and whose God can beat up another person’s God.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease because that is all the squeaky wheel actually wants; just the grease.
I know you aren’t supposed to offer advice unless you are asked, but I’m a fool in love and sometimes can’t help myself: You don’t have the right to not be offended, and, just because you believe it doesn’t make it true.
An open mind is a great thing to pass on to your kids.
A really good mom taught me this.
The UnDad 
I love this! My husband and I always agreed that the person who makes more in the family is the one that works after baby. He is the “bread winner” in our family, so he continued to work and I took the time off to stay home with our little man. That being said if the situation was reversed he would have taken the time off because in our family it isn’t just a mothers job to be there for our child. We are both his parents and both equally responsible to raise him.
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Theodore Roosevelt:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
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We are way past that stage, but when our son was wee and I was in Grad school, the majority of the stay-at-home duty was on me. Since then she and I competed for “major breadwinner” —a competition I even won once or twice— and now I once again find myself in the position of stay-at-home, try-to-find-freelance-work guy again, while she earns the big bucks. Actually right now I am enjoy the fruits of her hard work in the form of a year-long sabbatical and frankly couldn’t give a crap about anyone else’s opinions on the matter. And yes, they do have opinions.
All this to say, screw em. For all we believe that society’s values have caught up to the economic and social reality that we live in, it really hasn’t. But the more we, as individuals, live our lives in a reasoned and reasonable manner, the more likely the rest of them will someday see the light.
An open mind is indeed a great thing to pass on to your kids. Kudos.
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